LCC update: Press conference, Finding Nepo, Twitter game

11/30/2012 – Friday was the opening of the 4th London Chess Classic, the strongest ever event in Britain. It started with some informal games, a press conference where it was revealed that Magnus Carlsen's second Ian Nepomniachtchi would be granted a visa – and more relevantly: how to pronounce his name. It ended with a Twitter game. Remember: the games start on Saturday at 2 p.m. local time.

Finding Nepo

News Release by John Saunders

November 30 marked the opening of the 4th London Chess Classic, which succeeds
last year’s tournament as the strongest ever tournament in Britain. Note,
I’ve not described it as an opening ceremony as it was a generally informal
affair. Anyone who comes to London looking for pomp and ceremony should go to
watch the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace; the London Chess Classic
is a more relaxed affair.

The press conference was a tad later than we promised – apologies to
those of you watching online – as Magnus Carlsen and Judit Polgar were
whisked off for a photo-shoot at the London Eye and it took time to get them
back to Olympia through the London traffic. Meanwhile, the other top GMs, back
at Olympia, were limbering up with a practice game on the giant chess board
in the foyer at the venue.

Levon Aronian (above) took White against his girlfriend Ariane Caoili. You
might think, given the rating differential, he could at least have given his
girlfriend the white pieces – I, of course, could not comment.

Nigel Short helped even up the odds by joining Ariane’s team (picture
above), while a couple of kibitzers took the mickey. That wasn’t a clue
– Mickey Adams wasn’t one of them – but if Carlsberg did kibitzers,
it would probably have been these guys – current world champion Vishy
Anand and his immediate predecessor Vladimir Kramnik. Later, and not for the
first time this afternoon, there was a communications mix-up on the black side
of the chessboard, with a gigantic white queen thumping down on g6 to put an
end to this mega-skittles game.

By that time Magnus and Judit had arrived from their photo-shoot and we moved
to the press conference, with all nine competitors at the table with tournament
director Malcolm Pein chairing. The press conference was streamed live to the
vast internet audience. (You can still view it on our website.) Malcolm told
us that in excess of 360,000 people watched the tournament online in 2011, and
that we were hoping to exceed that in 2012.

Malcolm told us about the success of the Chess in Schools and Communities charity
which runs in parallel with the London Chess Classic, and which now funds chess
teachers at 176 primary schools in England and Wales in 30 different areas of
the UK, which we’re very proud of. This year we are encouraging the online
audience to donate a small sum – one dollar/euro/pound per viewer –
to the tournament to fund the charity and help ensure the continuation of the
tournament itself. We’ll be providing details of ways to do this during
subsequent live broadcasts and on the website.

We then moved to questions, from the online audience as well as the people
in the room. The first came from an Internet questioner with a Scandinavian
name. Sitting on the immediate right of Magnus Carlsen (above), Malcolm was
a little self-conscious about reading out the questioner’s name. After
a tentative try at pronouncing it, he turned to the world number one for help.
“Could he be a Norwegian with a name like that?” With immaculate
comic timing, Magnus shot back: “Not the way you pronounce it!”.
That brought the house down. A third career possibility for Magnus: after chess
super-GM and fashion model... stand-up comedian?

Seconds out

As was revealed
in the Norwegian press a couple of days ago, there had been problems getting
Magnus’s Russian second a visa to enter the UK and Magnus faced the prospect
of working on his own in London and only being able to contact his second via
internet telephony. This was not the first time Britain’s slightly fraught
diplomatic relationship with Russia had caused the tournament problems.

"Yann NepOMniashee" – that is how you pronounce it

Malcolm was on the point of naming the Russian GM in question but he then remembered
what had happened when he had tried to pronounce the Norwegian name. Instead
of having a stab at pronouncing Ian Nepomniachtchi’s name, he turned to
Magnus and said “I’m going to have pronunciation problems with Ian’s
name, aren’t I? Do you know how to say that one?” A cunning attempt
to turn the tables on Magnus, but the young man wasn’t falling for that
trick. After a slight hesitation, he answered “I don’t know!”
to another ripple of laughter. Malcolm had a valiant go at it but passed the
microphone to Vlad Kramnik for a definitive Russian pronunciation. “I
can do it better,” said Vlad. I can’t render the Kramnik pronunciation
in print but it was something like ‘Nepomniashee’, with a very slight
accentuation of the ‘om’ syllable, with the voice falling away on
the subsequent syllables. More importantly, the visa story had a happy ending:
Malcolm had used his diplomacy to persuade the Russians to issue Ian Nepomniachtchi
with a visa and he should arrive on Saturday to start work with the world number
one.

The Twitter Game

The players now proceeded to play a game against all-comers on Twitter, with
the Classic competitors playing moves in a fixed sequence. Reverse alphabetical
order was used, which meant that Judit Polgar had the honour of playing 1.d4
for the Classic stars on the giant chess set. I’m not entirely sure how
seriously the players on Twitter were taking this, but it is fair to say that
the Classic competitors treated it as a harmless bit of fun and took the opportunity
to tease each other about their choices of move. It is reassuring to see that
super-GMs are no different to ordinary club chessplayers in this respect. Once
the game was utterly won, they showed a more sadistic side of their nature,
spinning the game out for a few moves rather like a cat playing with a mouse.

The game was marred by a communications foul-up when a horrible blunder (15...e5??)
submitted via Twitter failed to be weeded out by the somewhat haphazard system
we were using to relay data and choose the world’s move (although, as
a Twitterer pointed out, at least the blunder proved we weren’t cheating
and using a chess engine). Maybe a brilliant chess computer programmer, like
Mark Uniacke of Hiarcs, could design us a chessplaying engine/Twitter interface
to remedy this technical problem and make it easier to handle the feed?

Nigel Short, like former British prime minister Gordon Brown before him, had
promised to ‘save the world’, but the position after 15...e5 proved
to be beyond even his chessboard lifesaving skills. Actually, it was probably
a timely mistake as it allowed the super-GMs to escape and get some rest before
the coming fray. The real fun starts tomorrow Saturday and you can follow all
the action at the official website.

Tournament Information

The 2012 London Chess Classic will take place in the Olympia
Conference Centre from Saturday, December 1st until Monday, December 10th.
Games start each day in general at 14:00h London time, except for round four
(16:00h) and the final round (12:00h). Time controls are classical forty moves
in two hours, then twenty moves in one hour and thirty minutes for the rest
of the game. A win is counted as three points, a draw as one, and a loss zero.
Tiebreaks: 1) number of wins, 2) number of wins with black, 3) result of the
individual game between the tied players. In the unlikely event that there is
still a tie then: 4) 2 x 15'+2" games, and if necessary 5) Armageddon game:
6'+2" vs 5'+2" with draw odds for black. If there is a tie involving
more than two players then the Rapid games will be conducted as a double round
all play all.

There are nine players, including the three top-ranked in the world, make
for a rating average of 2751. The player rested during each round will provide
commentary on the games in progress.

Name

Title

Country

Rating

W-rank

Born

Carlsen, Magnus

Super-Grandmaster

NOR

2848

1

30.11.1990

Aronian, Levon

Super-Grandmaster

ARM

2815

2

06.10.1982

Kramnik, Vladimir

Ex-World Champion

RUS

2795

3

25.06.1975

Anand, Viswanathan

World Champion

IND

2775

6

11.12.1969

Nakamura, Hikaru

Super-Grandmaster, US Nr. two

USA

2755

13

09.12.1987

McShane, Luke

Super-Grandmaster

ENG

2710

29

07.01.1984

Adams, Michael

Super-Grandmaster

ENG

2710

32

17.11.1971

Polgar, Judit

Super-GM, strongest female ever

HUN

2705

43

23.07.1976

Jones,Gawain

Grandmaster

ENG

2644

112

11.12.1987

Pairings

Round
1: Saturday, Dec. 1st, 2012, 14:00h

Luke McShane

Magnus Carlsen

Levon Aronian

Hikaru Nakamura

Vladimir Kramnik

Judit Polgar

Gawain Jones

Michael Adams

Vishy Anand (bye) – assisting
commentary

Round
2: Sunday, Dec. 2nd, 2012, 14:00h

Judit Polgar

Gawain Jones

Hikaru Nakamura

Vladimir Kramnik

Magnus Carlsen

Levon Aronian

Vishy Anand

Luke McShane

Michael Adams (bye) –
assisting commentary

Round
3: Monday, Dec. 3rd, 2012, 14:00h

Levon Aronian

Vishy Anand

Vladimir Kramnik

Magnus Carlsen

Gawain Jones

Hikaru Nakamura

Michael Adams

Judit Polgar

Luke McShane (bye) – assisting
commentary

Round
4: Tuesday, Dec. 4th, 2012, 16:00h

Hikaru Nakamura

Michael Adams

Magnus Carlsen

Gawain Jones

Vishy Anand

Vladimir Kramnik

Luke McShane

Levon Aronian

Judit Polgar (bye) – assisting
commentary

Wednesday,
Dec. 5th, 2012Rest day

Round
5: Thursday, Dec. 6th, 2012, 14:00h

Vladimir Kramnik

Luke McShane

Gawain Jones

Vishy Anand

Michael Adams

Magnus Carlsen

Judit Polgar

Hikaru Nakamura

Levon Aronian (bye) –
assisting commentary

Round
6: Friday, Dec. 7th, 2012, 14:00h

Magnus Carlsen

Judit Polgar

Vishy Anand

Michael Adams

Luke McShane

Gawain Jones

Levon Aronian

Vladimir Kramnik

Hikaru Nakamura (bye) –
assisting commentary

Round
7: Saturday, Dec. 8th, 2012, 14:00h

Gawain Jones

Levon Aronian

Michael Adams

Luke McShane

Judit Polgar

Vishy Anand

Hikaru Nakamura

Magnus Carlsen

Vladimir Kramnik (bye) –
assisting commentary

Round
8: Sunday, Dec. 9th, 2012, 14:00h

Vishy Anand

Hikaru Nakamura

Luke McShane

Judit Polgar

Levon Aronian

Michael Adams

Vladimir Kramnik

Gawain Jones

Magnus Carlsen (bye) –
assisting commentary

Round
9: Monday, Dec. 10th, 2012, 12:00h

Michael Adams

Vladimir Kramnik

Judit Polgar

Levon Aronian

Hikaru Nakamura

Luke McShane

Magnus Carlsen

Vishy Anand

Gawain Jones (bye) – assisting
commentary

The games – except for rounds four and nine – start at 2 p.m.
or 14:00h British time = 15:00h CET, 17:00h Moscow, 7:30 p.m. Chennai, 22:00h
Beijing, 01:00 a.m. Melbourne, 03:00 a.m. Auckland, 6 a.m. San José,
9 a.m. New York. You can check your location here.
Naturally the games will be covered live on the official web site (below) and
on Playchess. The games of round four begin two hours later, those of the final
round two hours earlier.

Links

The games will be broadcast live on the official
web site and on the chess server Playchess.com.
If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client and get
immediate access. Or you can get our latest Fritz
13 program, which includes six months free premium membership to Playchess.

See also

9/26/2017 – The final classical game. The finals has been relatively sedate with three draws until now. But it could all end today with one decisive game. Ding Liren has the black pieces today. It's going to be an exciting game. Games kick off at 13:00 CEST (7:00 AM EST) with live commentary from Tbilisi by GMs Evgeny Miroshnichenko and WGM Keti Tsatsalashvili and live updates by our reporters Sagar Shah and Amruta Mokal.

See also

7/5/2017 – This is neither prank nor clever wording: Garry Kasparov will be playing in the official St. Louis leg of the Grand Chess Tour from August 14-19, 2017. Please note that this is the Rapid and Blitz competition, just as the ones held in Paris and Levuen these last weeks, and not the classical events. However, this is not an exhibition event, and will determine the official Grand Chess Tour rankings as well as FIDE ratings of the players. Here is the press release.

Video

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